Bad Form

I am considering forming a union for the form-impaired: those of us -- and I hope I'm not the only one -- who can't fill out a form to save their lives. I think my problem stretches back to grade school, where, as my teachers delicately put it, I tested badly. 


I like to think my problem was not necessarily witlessness but maybe its opposite: an inability to believe that what was being asked was as easy as it appeared to be. So I was always second guessing exam questions: reinterpreting them in novel ways that sometimes impressed my more impressionable teachers in the humanities, but got me nowhere with the autistics and martinets who taught math and science. 


Now, in this, the sixth decade of my existence, I do the same thing with forms. I have spent my post graduate life -- not that I ever graduated from anything -- avoiding examinations. But I can't always avoid their first cousins -- forms -- which pose the same problem. I'm just never sure what a form is really asking me. For just my surname? Really? Is that all they mean? And what is a surname, when you think about it? "Sur" means "atop" in French,  doesn't it? So doesn't that mean "top name," which must mean "first name?" They can't mean my last name, can they? If they did, wouldn't they say so? And what exactly do they mean by my "address?" Do they want just the town I live in, or the street address, or what?  


The result of all this second guessing is a stream of items in my mailbox or on my doorstep I didn't mean to order, bills I didn't pay, reservations I didn't mean to make, commitments to campaigns I don't support, not to mention all the items, reservations and contributions I intended to make but either got sent to the wrong recipient or disappeared into the ether. 


Maybe I'm alone in this, as I seem to be in so many other respects. My wife, for instance, can fill out a form without a hitch. I don't think she's ever encountered one of those web page error messages saying, for instance, that she forgot to put in the little three-digit number on the back of her credit card (Which three-finger digit? is what I want to know. There are a whole lot of numbers back there, aren't there, including a phone number.) Whereas I sometimes receive such warnings so repeatedly in a single transaction that the web page will simple conclude I'm too stupid to live and shut me down completely. 


I guess the biggest hurdle to my founding a union of similarly disabled people would be the application process. So forget the whole thing. I'm not putting anyone through that again.